To set context, I’m the co-founder CTO of a company with a flat hierarchy of 25 engineers reporting to me (everyone runs their own show so it’s not that difficult). I’ve never felt more productive in my life. And before all the engineers wince at a co-founder writing slop code, let me preface that I don’t mess around with the core feature set, I work in the periphery where I have always loved…
Fuze was built on a completely different mindset than allround . With allround, I was trying to maximise the expected outcome in life. With Fuze, I just wanted to enjoy the process of building something that scales and serves thousands if not millions of people, while working with a cracked team that loves the process. During my sabbatical, a hard realisation that hit me was that I might not be…
allround , the first startup that I attempted was a calculated decision. I loved my job at Goldman Sachs, and was working with one of the best teams in low latency algorithms and brilliant people. My only qualm was a career trajectory which was a conventional growth path and it wasn’t fast enough for me. I’m a big believer of taking the path not taken where the expected value of success is far…
One common refrain that I get from a lot of folks is a quizzical look when I say that I still code and spend 30-40% of my time in the trenches with the engineering team designing and architecting solutions for Fuze . A lot of times I shrug it off, but I thought I should take out the time today to talk about why I continuing doing something which might go against the grain. The simple answer to why…
Professors has completely autonomy over their courses at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and boy o boy, did it translate to some really fun and innovating grading schemes. Professor TV Prabhakar (or Professor TVP) is probably of the coolest professor that I can recall from my days of college. I’ve already written about the time when he cancelled a class on account of it being April’s fool…
The one thing that Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur taught me was that you can just do things. This is the story of professor Dheeraj Sanghi, probably one of the most based professors of IITK because he didn’t care for the status quo on most instances. Mozilla had launched their ‘Winter of Security’ Programme to compete with Google’s Summer of Code. But they had one catch, it was supposed to…
While it’s well know that BITS Pilani has no mandatory attendance, not a lot of folks know that Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur also doesn’t mandate attendance. This is the story of the only course I never attended in my four years of IIT Kanpur and how the professor tried to bribe the students to attend classes. The most dreaded class that you could sign up for is the 8am class in the…
Sometimes you need to get your hands dirty and go down the rabbit hole. This was exactly what we had to do when we saw intermittent 502 errors on our API stack. 502 errors on AWS ALB The initial hypothesis was restarts at night, but the frequency of the errors was higher than the number of automated restarts. So to dig deeper we accessed the access logs of ALB (which are stored in gzip and add a…
I’ve always been immersed in Japanese culture. Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Beyblade, Death Note, Code Geass, Naruto, Kimi no Na wa , Murakami. But even that could not have prepared me for the whirlwind that Japan is. Movies, anime and books capture only a sliver of the Japanese experience. The sensory overload of being in the streets of Shinjuku or Shibuyu, listening to the cacophony of the eclectic…
I’m a big fan of TailScale, and we extensively use it at Fuze as well. While most of the guides of TailScale are straightforward, I’ve found the section on subnet routers a bit obtuse or incomplete for the lack of a better word. So here’s my guide on how to setup a subnet router which will allow you to access private IPs on an AWS subnet (or any subnet) directly from TailScale. You need to setup a…
This blog has been written because there wasn’t any good comprehensive guide to run a websocket server using AWS Load Balancer where the health check runs on a different port. In theory (and practice) you can run health checks on the same port as your web socket server, but unfortunately ALB does not support native WS communications. In fact all communications are using HTTP 1.1 with your Origin…
As I’ve written before Fuze is a security company as much as it is a finance and technology company. In addition to having a strong testing culture at Fuze, we also have a strong security culture by including security in the SLDC supply chain. AWS ECS At Fuze, we used AWS ECS to deploy our production infrastructure and CI/CD is run through GitHub Actions. The only difference between our…
I test in production. The last thing any programmer wants to do is write tests. And I get it, I’ve been there. Writing tests can be boring. And I’m not going to give you a long lecture about why you should write tests, I’m just going to show what we’ve done at Fuze over the course of the next 2-3 posts. This particular post is about the fundamental unit of testing - Unit Testing. To lay the…
OARS - Four letters that could fill any graduate of IIT Kanpur from 2009 to 2015 with abject horror. While presented as a system to register for courses for the next semester, it was a machine of widespread torture by crushing your hopes and your soul at the exact moment that they are the highest. The beauty of OARS was that it was universally hated by both students and professors, a common themes…
Professors in Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur are based and here is another story of such a professor. IIT Kanpur provides complete autonomy to professors, they can run the classes according to their whims and fancies. The reason we don’t have mandatory attendance is the professors only want interested students, and yet some classes are jam packed. One such professor was Professor TVP. If…
This wasn’t because we had diligent students who attended all classes, on the contrary Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur didn’t have a mandatory attendance policy. And yet, the rumour mill didn’t churn with the news of a ‘mass bunk’, until CSE Y11 did. It was the last class before spring break of 2013 and Professor Biswas was teaching us ‘Abstract Algebra’ (side note, it’s still abstract for…
What really hurts is not the loss of friendship, but the loss of intimacy. The ability to walk into your best friend’s room at a moment’s notice, the roar of laughter in the room next door when you return from your classes. The spontaneous eruption of joy and tears over a few drinks you smuggled into the hostel from the prying eyes of the guards. As you grow older and friendships yonder, you miss…
Ever run into the problem of maxing out your cloud capacity in one provider (most possibly on the free tier) and being left with no other solution but to upgrade because you can’t move your data? Or got into the solution of migrating data from a work account to a backup? I got into somewhat of a fix lately as I had to transfer over 4TB of data from AWS to a Google Drive account (with infinite free…
I’ve been experimenting with various new age deployment and JAMStack solutions out there. Since I’ve been using cloudflare for over 8 years (as of writing this post), I thought I’ll give it a shot as a cheap caching server replacing Redis + Node.js . Writing the REST server to handle requests using Cloudflare Workers and KV is fairly straightforward: addEventListener ( " fetch " , event => { if (…
Another short one but very useful trick in my moving from Linux to Mac series. One of my most used shortcuts in the terminal is Alt + . , which I adapted from my bash workflow to my zsh workflow when I started using zsh. It basically inserts the last word from the previous command. This turns out to be very handy and I use it multiple times a day. There is no out of the box way to accomplish this…